How Many Times Can One Live a Life?
by eso terik
Summary: Alex sits in her deathbed, reminiscing on a hundred lives past. Finally free from the ghosts, she'd created a life for herself, and accepted its end. But when the ghosts interrupt her trip to the afterlife, she'll experience an emotional journey through her life. If she were given the opportunity to do it all over, would she? An Oxenfree One-shot.


**AN: this story will probably be seen by less people than any of my other works, by simple virtue of it being written for Oxenfree, as opposed to BOTW, DDLC, or any of the other games i'll eventually write stories over that are exponentially more popular. but this story meant a lot more to me than anything else i've ever written, and probably more than anything else i'll ever write. this story was... a love letter, for lack of a better term, to this world. let me explain. Oxenfree was the first game i ever really, honestly fell in love with. summer 2016, i was scrolling through the xbox live game store, when i saw Oxenfree. the art style of the cover alone had me, hook, line, and sinker. i played the whole game in a single night. over the next week, i played the game seven more times. i couldn't get enough of the world and everything in it, and even when i'd gotten every single achievement on the game, had played through every single possible outcome, and knew all the lines to the bottom of my heart, i hadn't gotten enough. so, for the first time in my life, i went on to this website i'd heard of through a couple of friends called , and i read a fanfiction. once more with feeling, by sarsaparilla. this story alone is a must-read, as are the other two installments in sara's Oxenfree series, and inspired me to go out and write my own thoughts about the game into a world of their own. i started several accounts, trying to pin down the right way to express just how deeply i felt about this game, and failed in each of those several attempts. i gave up for a while, and then came back and made this account, and gave it one, final shot. the following story is the reason this account exists, and the story that i would fight to the death to leave up, even if it meant deleting every single other word i've ever written.**

 _ **TW: the fic contains a graphic depiction of suicide.**_

 **i truly hope you enjoy.**

* * *

It'd been a long life. _Many_ long lives, really, each one a little longer than the last. She'd forgotten exactly how many, but remembered that once upon a time, her dead brother had joked with her that, with how much she spaced out, if she didn't get dementia at some point he'd be shocked. Michael didn't know that she spaced out so much because she couldn't shake the image of his face slipping under the lake's calm surface, but that was alright. He didn't need to.

Alex had thought those words more times than she could count throughout her lives. The past sixty years, especially, had been a life filled with the thought. She _could_ have told those around her that the reason she could seemingly read their minds was because they'd said the exact same things every time for the past hundred times, but that wouldn't help anything. Hell, based on her previous record, giving out too much information was flirting with doing it all over.

But now none of that really mattered, did it?

Here, in the same bed she'd been more or less stuck to for the past year, with the sun peering in through the window across the room, she'd had plenty of time to reflect on it all. She had five regrets. Each of them had a name.

Michael. Ren. Nona. Clarissa. Jonas

As she looked around the room, full of people who'd dedicated their lives to loving her, she recognized that those four regrets were absent. But of course they were. They'd passed some time ago. And now she would join them.

Alex was jostled from her introspection by a squeeze on her hand. Her daughter, Samantha. To Alex, it was obvious that the woman was holding back tears, but to anyone else, that would've been invisible. Sam got it. Got it like no one but those previous four had. She had to be strong, couldn't let her emotions get the best of her, because _dear god,_ she'd hate for the last image her mother saw to be her being weak. Alex knew the feeling, to know that someone you've loved is going to die and having to put on a strong face for them. She'd felt it several times herself. She reached her hand toward Sam's face, her fingers making contact with the side of her face, when the metronome of her life drowned into a long monotone, and her hand slowly dropped.

* * *

Alex wasn't afraid of dying. How could she be, when she'd spent her whole life dying? The blue was long faded from her hair, and the worry lines she'd spent her early years cultivating were overshadowed by the wrinkles of smiles, but she hadn't forgotten the island.

Edwards Island. Just one part of a long and glorious history.

The choice she'd made once had haunted her for a thousand lives. No amount of therapy, loved ones, or pills could shut out the voices of the damned or make her listen to the radio again. It was all too real.

Alex didn't mind her own death. Maybe then, those voices would finally quiet for just a moment, and she could find peace.

What worried her, though, was the fact that no prophecies about death had come true. She hadn't woken up as a baby in some other life, like the reincarnationists had insisted. She wasn't walking up to heaven's pearly gates or being dragged down to hell, like the Abrahamics had believed. And everything hadn't simply ended, like the atheists had hypothesized.

Her senses were still intact. The bed she'd laid on was still there. Everything else in the universe, though, was all-consuming blackness. It was familiar, she'd been in this void a hundred times. A thousand. A million, maybe. She wouldn't rule it out.

Why was she back here?

This query was answered when a facsimile of her room formed, a fake sun glaring in on her, pounding on her skin and eyes. The door at the far end of the room opened with a creak, and in floated a dark body, with two red eyes staring at her, and thousands more red dots in its core.

"I know this isn't real," Alex said, and was surprised by the lack of a croak in her voice. She hadn't sounded like this for decades. Come to think of it, the voice wasn't the only holdover from her younger days. The left knee that'd bothered her ever since she pushed it a little too far while hiking in her forties felt just fine. The hospital gown she'd worn for forever wasn't there, either. In its place was the red jacket that was way, _way_ too big for her, but that she refused to let out of her sight. Her hair was in a ponytail. She hadn't kept it in a ponytail since high school. Alex didn't have to check to know that that ponytail (and the rest of her hair, for that matter) was teal.

"So... I guess that that was all fake," Alex asked openly. The ghosts only stared. "Okay, whether or not I just lived, like, sixty years of completely fake life for your sick enjoyment aside, are you gonna talk? Or just sit there, like a real weirdo?" The ghosts seemed content to take the second choice, which pissed Alex right off. She remembered that, in this jacket, she'd always carried her pocket radio in the right pocket. She took it out and brandished it menacingly. "I'll do it if you don't talk," Alex warned, and then felt dumb immediately after doing so. What did the ghosts care if she used the radio? They could just make her live through hell on the island again until she somehow stumbled back to this exact same place.

"You could do that, if you wanted," they said, their voice clear for the first time.

"Whoa, okay, that's freakier than it should be," Alex muttered. "What's up with the real voice? Thought you couldn't talk without radio waves or someone to talk through?"

"Cell phones."

"Explain."

"You walked around your whole life with a cell phone. We commandeered that cell phone to record every interaction you had. Any word that anyone ever said to you when your phone was around. We can use those sound waves to do the same thing we did with the radio."

"That's, like, _suuuuper_ creepy, dude."

The ghosts shrugged. "Not any more creepy than anything else we've done, really."

"Point. But anyway, why am I here?"

The ghosts cleared their throat. "Finally, you get to the point. You're probably expecting us to send you back at any second now. But we're not planning on it. You see, we've learned. We can't force you to play with us anymore. We watched you for a long, long time. And we can't force you to go back anymore. Like, it's _really_ clear that you're not super into it anymore."

"So then why are you here?"

"Because we can't let you go, Alex... we're sorry, we just can't."

"So you're just going to lock me in this dark ass void for forever, then? that's not any more kosher than just resetting me, dude!"

"No. See, you're _dead_. We have no power over you anymore. Not that you aren't willing to give us. You could leave at any moment." The ghosts gestured to the door they'd entered from. "Nothing is stopping you from walking out. We'd understand if you were ready to move on to the next life."

"So you're just here because you don't really have any other choice, then? You could never move on, could you? You're always stuck here, in this in-between."

"Sort of. We could leave, but... but it's scary. We're terrified of what lies beyond this little corridor we've lived in for so long. But we have another option for you."

"Another option? You mean, other than going to heaven, or hell, or nothingness, or whatever it is that I deserve?"

"Yes."

"Why would I want to do that? You guys have seriously fucked up my life - _lives_ \- for _way too long now_. Why would I let you get your greasy little fingers on my afterlife, too?" Alex got up out of the bed, headed toward the door.

"Wait," the ghosts called. And, for some reason, Alex did. Standing at the precipice of whatever was to come, the ghosts used the voice of her daughter to call out to her.

"Alright, you fuckwad," Alex hissed, tears forming at the edges of her eyes. "That was _dirty_. But you have my attention."

"Sorry," the ghosts said, this time commandeering Jonas's voice. "Sometimes, we have to use different voices. There are only so many words we have recorded. Certain words, we only have one recording of."

"Just get on with it," she snapped.

"Ouch." The glare that Alex gave them could've shattered diamond. The ghosts took a moment, sorting through their registrar of voices to find one that was suitably unoffensive. They settled on Sara, one of Alex's girlfriends from college, and one that she'd parted ways with rather peacefully. A soft voice, with slight Vietnamese undertones continued, "The radio that you're holding onto right now can send you back, if you want. You can start over. Do the whole thing again. A clean slate, a whole life lived over again. We won't interfere, except for in the first few months, where you know we have to. You'll have free reign, you can do whatever you want with it."

"Why would I want to live through the exact same life again?"

"It won't be the same life. We scripted a few things in past lives, held some events back. Not this time. Think of all that you know, all that you did, and all that you regret. You can fix everything that went wrong, do everything that you didn't do but always wanted to! Just think. You lived far too long without the five people who you really loved."

Oh, _fuck_ , why did they have to say that?

* * *

 _Whirling winds in a dark night. It's raining sideways and the roads winding the mountain, always perilous, are now almost impossibly dangerous. That doesn't stop idiot teenagers from being idiot teenagers, though. A bag of chips is flying through the truck, because Ren's a dumbass and always has to throw everything. The laughter on the inside is even louder than the thunder outside. Michael's eyes are on the road, but he was never a particularly smart driver, and he's going way too fast for these conditions. No one on the inside of the truck seems to mind, though. Of the three of them; Ren, Michael, and Alex, only Alex is in the back seat, buckled in. Alex messes with Michael as the three come up to a bend, and his eyes snap back for just a moment. Even more laughter. Spirits are high. Suddenly, the truck hits a bump. That bump was the road's guardrail. They're in freefall now, the road no longer beneath them. The truck's grill meets the ground, and suddenly, they're rolling down the mountain. The driver's window shatters on the ground, and suddenly Michael is no longer in the car. Something happens on the rest of the way down, and Ren's dead, too._

 _One regret. Two._

 _Just like the first time around, Michael held everything together. Her mother and her father split up. Clarissa isn't seen around town for a week. Alex pays her a visit, but there's no one there to talk to. Unless you count the corpse dangling from the ceiling by a thread._

 _Three._

 _Nona's not quite the same, but Alex can't blame her for that. She still remembers the first time Michael died, how a cold shower feels through three layers of clothes, how it feels to cry until you have no more tears left, and then not stop crying. A few years pass by. Two years into college, and Nona finally starts to come out of her shell. She'll tag along with Jonas and Alex for dinner with the two of them, or parties, or whatever their psych professor assigns as what he calls "homework to have fun". And it's nice. After a while, she doesn't even cry anymore. _

_Then it all breaks again. Jonas gets the diagnosis. The cigs he's spent his whole life smoking are finally coming around to get him. By the time they spotted the lung cancer, it was too late to stop it. He dies at 23. Alex blames herself more than a little. How could she have learned so much about him and not seen that his smoking was a self-destructive mechanism designed to bring him closer to his mother, even if it means death? She's supposed to be a fucking psychologist._

 _Four._

 _After that, the remnants of the night on Edwards Island number at two. Nona and Alex stay friends throughout college, because, how could they not? They share the same traumas, the same major, the same interests, the same everything. Come to think of it, it wouldn't have been a surprise if the two had ended up dating, but they were content with sharing the rent on an apartment just outside of Denver. The two had picked there to move after college because, although neither would openly admit it, they didn't want to ever see an island, or even a beach again in their lives. _

_They lived together for a couple of years, Nona understanding when Alex did weird shit like go out for a mile run at midnight in December, when it's three-below and it takes more effort to shove your legs through the snow than to run the damn mile, all to get the fucking voices out of her head. Until one night, when Alex went out in a particularly dangerous blizzard, the snow and ice clinging to her face, stinging her in just the way that she can't smell cigarette smoke, can't hear crunching metal and shattering glass, can't see the red eyes in the shadows and the triangles in the sky. She's gone for too long, it turns out, because Nona decides to go out after her. She finds Alex vomiting in the park's trash can, and drags her home, Alex kicking and screaming the whole way. It turns out the next day that Alex got herself sick, and Nona has to cover for her at the mental clinic across town. She never came back. The roads were iced over, and if it hadn't been for Alex, she never would've left the house that day. The body wasn't found for three days, due to the snow._

 _Five._

* * *

Alex shook the tears from her eyes. "Explain yourself," she said, her voice cracking.

"You know everything that happened, everything that killed them all. You can save them all. Remember the room that you died in? Remember the faces there? Not a single one of them knew your life story. They couldn't have. They'd never understand. Only those five ever could. You can have them back."

"Why should I fuck with death?"

"When did you start asking yourself that question? Remember Michael? You didn't seem to have a problem bringing his soul back, over and over and over again."

"Touche. But if I go through this door, they'll all be there, too."

The ghosts shrugged. "Maybe," they said. "Maybe not. We couldn't say for sure. After all, none of us have ever been there. The Christians might've been right, and then every one of you except maybe Nona would be just fine. Or the Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, or any number of other religions, forgotten by time, and then you'd never see them again. We don't know. But we know this: you have carved yourself a liminal space, an in-between space. With a little bit of our help, you have found a way to live this life indefinitely. If you want, you can give it one final go. We'll even throw you a little surprise."

"You've got me there. I'll take you up on your offer."

"Just dial the radio to 102.3 FM. We'll be eagerly awaiting your arrival."

The ghosts began to dissipate, but it was Alex's turn to interrupt. "Wait," she called. They stopped, reforming, and looked on expectantly. "Why me? I mean, there's plenty of other people. Hell, as far as I know, the high schoolers still have the annual party on Edwards each year. There were four other people that went with me, even. Why am I the one you got so enticed by?"

The ghosts were silent for a moment, thinking. "You'll have to figure that out on your own, Alex."

"And why are you doing this? Maggie's journals said that you were really no more advanced than kids, and everything I'd seen and heard from you seemed to tell the same story, but this is, like, a full-on, thought-out, adult thing for you to do."

"We're doing this because we died with regrets. Every single one of us has words we wish we'd have said, actions we wish we'd have taken, and, if we were given the chance, we'd all go back and make changes. You gave us, in a vicarious sense, a life. We followed you as you grew up, went through college, and grew old, and for that we owe you. Besides, you always gave us every single chance on Edwards to go peacefully. We aren't sure if you remember, but there were even a few times you offered us your own life in exchange for your friends. We respect that, and now we owe you the same."

"So you'll really leave me alone?"

"Sort of. Edwards will be Edwards. That much is immutable. No matter how little we interfere with the timeline, the alternative to our interference is that you die in that cave."

"Wait, I die?"

"Yes, an earthquake happens, and the cavern ceiling falls. You, Jonas, and Ren are crushed to death."

"I suppose that finding you isn't that unlucky."

"Indeed. The universe works in mysterious ways. But, since we're still here, might we ask you one question?"

"Shoot, I guess."

"We followed the events of your life intently. You know this much. That meant watching you every second of every day, even in your lowest times. But, we noticed something peculiar. When your friends died, you had differing degrees of emotional response to each. By far, your most extreme response was to Jonas's death. Why is this? We have formulated several hypotheses. The first is that there is a limit to the exertion of human affect. It explains your responses to the deaths of Ren, Michael, and Clarissa very well, as their deaths were in such close proximity to each other that your mind simply could not mourn each of them fully. When Nona passed, you had seen so much death that you were nearly numb to it, allowing you to continue on. Jonas, therefore, was optimally situated for you to mourn, as his death took up your full attention for quite a while. Is this hypothesis valid? There is a second."

"What's the second?"

"The second thought, which is based on our admittedly dated understanding of several social principles, is that you cared more for Jonas than you did for the others of your group. If love looks like what we think it looks like, then we would even say that you loved him."

Alex thought for a moment, before deciding the best way to respond to the ghosts was with their own mysterious medicine. "You'll have to figure that out on your own, ghosts."

"Touche," they laughed. And a moment after that, they were gone.

Alex turned back to the door, radio in hand. She was standing at a crossroads, in what the ghosts had called a liminal space. A choice between life and whatever came after lay at her fingertips. She'd told the ghosts that she'd take their offer, but... she was having second thoughts.

Because life is painful, and reliving would mean experiencing all that pain over again. She still remembered that night on Edwards Island, the feel of her muscles literally tearing themselves apart on no sleep to keep her alive, to keep her friends' souls intact. She still remembered how grief felt. She still remembered how numb she'd felt after Michael died again, the universe seemingly telling her that all her efforts to bring him back were wastes of fucking time, haha, start over. She still remembered how her shattered arm had screamed at her as she'd dragged Ren's still-breathing body out of the truck, how she'd screamed as she gave him CPR, trying desperately to keep him alive until someone more qualified than her could, and how the tears had torn her eyes apart as she lay sobbing over the corpse of her only childhood friend. She still remembered how her stomach had turned when she'd seen the dried blood at the corner of Clarissa's mouth, the bruises around her neck. She still remembered how she'd blamed herself for Nona's death for years, never really getting over it, how the woman had been such a selflessly great friend to Alex that the final words she'd ever told her were "You don't worry about me, I know you'd do the same.". She still remembered sitting at Jonas's deathbed, clutching onto his hand with both of hers, holding on for dear life, loudly sobbing into his arm about how sorry she was, how she should've helped him, and how she'd never forget him.

But she remembered the good things, too. She remembered waking up on the ferry back from Edwards, seeing Michael's grinning face over hers. She remembered the nights beneath the stars in the bed of Michael's truck, pointing at weird constellations and laughing, always laughing. She remembered the partying with Jonas and Nona, as well as the quiet dinners they'd had together, discussing the mundane parts of life over bowls of ramen or spaghettios (to this day, she still had the palate of a fucking toddler, but if anyone wanted to step to her about spaghettios with franks, she'd tear their fucking head off). She still remembered every girlfriend, every boyfriend, and every good moment she'd had with each of them. She still remembered Sam, and how proud she'd been when her daughter graduated college and had progeny of her own.

And, most of all, she still remembered the things she wished she'd have done. The things she wished she'd have said.

She remembered that the last conscious thought she'd had in life was wishing that Jonas was there by her side.

The decision was made.

* * *

Alex stood at the bow of the ferry, looking forward into the sunset, and thought over it all.

She'd lived a thousand lifetimes under the careful watch of the ghosts, and was a little scared of leaving it all behind.

But, all in all...

There wasn't a damn thing she'd done that she regretted.


End file.
